Airspeed!
Before 11th lesson I was a little bit frustrated. It’s been already 10 lessons, of which 4 strictly spent on learning how to land and I still couldn’t do it right. This time weather seemed to cooperate. Temperature was 16, wind 140@7. Almost perfect. As you will see later on the track – my pattern today was much nicer than last time – except the first one (which turned out to be the airplane being trimmed to turn right by itself) which took me too far from the runway both up and downwind.
Today I decided to concentrate on one part of a landing at a time. Wind was almost exactly in a runway direction so there was almost no need for crab. Good – that caused some problems last time. Now the next thing – the airspeed. I decided, that no matter what I’ll try to keep the speed as manual says – 100 mph on downwind, 90 mph on base, 80 mph on final. It is much harder in Piper as it’s clean and has tendency to pick up speed real fast (well.. in comparison to C172). But focusing on pitch and trim it’s doable. More last couple of tries went almost natural – 80 that is! There is more to that – when you keep the airspeed as you should – the plane lands almost by itself. No need to do any heroic maneuvers – it goes straight down to the numbers as it should and touches down nicely.
Now the most important part – flare. I still don’t catch it very well. Especially that the ground effect in this plane is much bigger. Also I’m a little bit nervous as the front wheel is directly connected to the rudder so I have to be very careful not to swerve from the runway the moment I touch down. But we’ll get there. I can’t wait!
Here is my track:
1.1h : 8 to/ldg logged
11.9h : 39 to/ldg total
